Technology in #Genealogy – Google Books, iPhone/iPad

Stanczyk wanted to elaborate on a few new ideas for incorporating Technology into your genealogy:

Roots Tech 2012 – registration is open. Get all your tech on Feb 2-4, 2012 in Salt Lake City

Google Books – Many good books are in the public domain, road map to the rest

iPhone/iPad – genealogy on the go

Hash Tags in your blog, blog title and link your blog to Twitter

The secondRoots Tech 2012 conference is coming up soon. If you are trying to make better use of your scant genealogy time, then perhaps using more technology to organize, find, backup or present your research may be the order of the day. This year many big tech companies will be there, as well as genealogy software vendors. Here is your chance to learn and to try out new ideas.

Google Books may help you locate material specific to genealogy, such as a gazetteer or a heritage book like the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR). It can also help you with reference materials, such as Latin. Look for “Free Books” (i.e. public domain), such as, “The Poles in America” By Paul Fox. If you are looking for a book that is in copyright, Google Books can help you locate the book in the nearest library/archive or a vendor who sells it.

iPhone/iPad – Genealogy has gone portable with the advent of smart phones. Laptops were fine but smart phones are now better. I have grown fond of the Ancestry app for iPhone. It keeps getting better. I use it to shoot an image of a document and then attach it to a person in the tree. So now you can take pictures of the microfilm and attach the document in the tree. It synchs virtually immediately so you can see in on the web at Ancestry.com as soon as the upload from the phone has finished. I have one of those public domain Latin books from Google or the Gutenberg Project on my iPhone in iBooks app. So you have your family tree software, digital camera, and reference materials all in one device — your phone.

#HashTags – You see them in twitter all of the time. They are like Key Words in a library catalog. Twitter can produce “What’s Trending” from these hash tags. But you can hook up your blog to twitter and so you should put Hash Tags in your Posting’s title to help people find it on Twitter or in Google. I even use them in Facebook.

2 Comments to “Technology in #Genealogy – Google Books, iPhone/iPad”

I have found a tremendous amount of genealogy information from Google Books. See my blog about Google Books and Genealogy. The blog is about how to structure some queries using the Google Books search engine and some of what I found.